Twitter Facts Everyone Should Know

by Stephanie Suesan Smith on May 1, 2011

In honor of the start of the 2011 WordCount Blogathon, I thought I would mention five things you might not know about Twitter.

1)There may seem to be no connection between blogging and Twitter, but they go hand in hand. Readers of your blog look for a Twitter account to follow you and people who see your Tweets follow them to your blog.

2)Don’t make your readers hunt for your Twitter id so they can follow you. Make sure you post one of the blue buttons linked to your Twitter id in the upper right hand portion of your sidebar or header. That is where people expect to see it. If you don’t know how to post such a button, ask for help.

3)If you establish a Twitter account but never send from it, no one can find you in a search. Twitter searches messages, so no message, no find.

4)If someone follows your Twitter account, it is generally polite to follow them. Exceptions are spammers and people you just cannot abide. Twitter has a ratio of followers to followed that it forces. If you follow way more people than follow you, things lock up. Add people slowly to allow things to adjust, or you may have problems.

5)Tempted to lock your tweets? Please don’t. Remember, Twitter is a social media. You want things said there repeated as widely as possible. Locking your tweets marks you as an amateur. Besides, unless you are only sending information to yourself, there is nothing to stop a recipient of a locked tweet from sending it to God and Country. Remember that and only send things you won’t mind both knowing.

Social media intimidating you? Do you want to write a blog post and have it appear in several places at once so you have more time to write your magnum opus? I have written a pamphlet with step-by-step instructions on how to harness your RSS feed called Using Social Media to Make Your Blog Work Harder, available for $0.99 from Amazon.com.

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I have trouble using facebook. There are so many places now that it is almost impossible to cover them all. Pick one or two and do a good job of covering them rather than a tepid job of covering all of them.

Hi Stephanie,
Thank you for posting this. I haven’t started using Twitter yet and until recently I really didn’t understand why I would want to use it. Social media generally doesn’t intimidate me, but Twitter does. I feel overwhelmed with all the tweets and info on there. I find that I prefer to use RSS feeds instead of Twitter because my brain can handle it better. Kudos to you for including both RSS and Twitter links and making them so easy to find on your blog!

Hello Stephanie,
Great post!! Thank you for these tips, Twitter has always suffered an image problem and is not usually taken very seriously by the general public.Adam recently posted..Olive Garden Salad Dressing